NATO stands for war.

• Position: North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion - Editorial

Who was the genius who thought up expanding NATO? The alliance is supposed to make us safer. It does not. It imperils our survival and bankrupts us in the process.

NATO depends on a doctrine of nuclear war. For forty years, it threatened global conflagration: If the Soviet Union put a toe into West Germany, NATO promised to wage nuclear war against Moscow. Now NATO has simply moved that line eastward. If Moscow puts a toe into Hungary, Poland, or the Czech Republic, our missiles will fly.

This is a direct violation of the pledge the Bush Administration made to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out. At that time, Gorbachev was negotiating the removal of his troops from Central and Eastern Europe. He allowed NATO to put troops in the former East Germany on one condition: that NATO not move any farther eastward.

We've now broken our word.

No sooner had NATO granted admission to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic than the other shoe fell: the Russian shoe.

Yeltsin, under pressure from the ultranationalists in his country, understandably felt threatened by the move. He announced that the Russians would most likely not ratify the Start II treaty, which would have reduced nuclear warheads to roughly 3,000 on each side. (The United States has 8,100 today; the Russians, 6,700.)

But now these bloated Cold War arsenals will remain. Equally alarming, Yeltsin has now adopted a "first-use" policy for nuclear weapons. Starting with Gorbachev, Russian leaders had pledged not to be the first country to use nuclear weapons. But the NATO expansion prompted Yeltsin to rescind that pledge.

"If we are driven into a corner and are left with no other option, we will resort to nuclear weapons," said Boris Berzovsky, deputy head of Russia's security council.

The Washington Post editorial Brahmins scolded Yeltsin, saying his first-use policy was a "foray into what to him is the relatively novel field of nuclear doctrine." While Yeltsin is wrong to adopt such a policy, it was a logical and foreseeable consequence of the reckless NATO expansion.

If the primary threat to our security in the United States is nuclear war, why in the world are we doing something that makes nuclear war more likely?

We are approaching the day when we once again are kept on nuclear tenterhooks, thanks to Clinton's diplomatic disaster, which he wrapped in celebratory paper.

The financial cost of NATO, especially at a time of ruthless budget-cutting, is...